Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay — Ben Katchor

The classic graphic novel by the landmark cartoonist is back in print for its twenty-fifth anniversaryCheap Novelties is an early testament to Ben Katchor''s extraordinary prescience as both a gifted cartoonist and an astute urban chronicler. Rumpled, middle-aged Julius Knipl photographs a vanishing city - an urban landscape of low-rent apartment buildings, obsolete industries, monuments to forgotten people and events, and countless sources of inexpensive food. In Katchor''s signature pen and ink wash style, Cheap Novelties is a portrait of what we have lost to gentrification, globalization, and the malling of America that is as moving today as it was twenty-five years ago.

In 1991, the original Cheap Novelties appeared in an unassuming paperback from the RAW contributor; it would become one of the first books of the contemporary graphic novel golden age, and it set the stage for Katchor to become regarded as a modern-day cartooning genius. Drawn & Quarterly''s twenty-fifth anniversary edition is a deluxe hardcover reformatted to Katchor''s original vision.